What is it about?
This paper engages interestingly with the dynamics of ethnic identification among three groups in the Mandara Mountains. The central argument is that the ethnic identities in this zone emerge from bodily and material practices, including ritual and religious practice, rather more than from colonial practices of classification and governance. In so doing, the paper stands as another perspective on the ethnicity in this region examining it through architectural practices while most authors were more interested in ceramics and to a certain extent in metals and mortuary practices.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The article deals with the emergence of ethnicity in the Mandara Mountains by going again the grain of recent theorizing, which puts the root cause for ethnicity squarely in the hands of the colonizer. It argues that there is more to the ethnic issue and that processes of collective self-identification have much deeper roots in these mountains. In that area the interplay between villages, clusters of villages and the ethnic genesis is shown off by the division of the group over two former colonies (Cameroon and Nigeria), now two independent nation states. Ethnic formation is not simply older than the colonial rule, but a complex interactive process, the roots of which lie way before colonial occupation, stimulated by ecology, internal wars, jihadist slave raiding, language fragmentation, and external rule, like the colonial one, the formation of nation states and now – again – jihadist terror of Boko Haram.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a great pleasure to the extent that it echoes important work on ethnicity in Africa, including the work of archaeologists Scott MacEachern and Nicholas David. That said, my approach do not claim to be closed to criticism. Similarly, my results should not be perceived as challenging archaeological and anthropological work carried out before my own. Instead, they should be seen as complementary, in the sense that they offer new hypotheses that can later be confronted with new archaeological materials. All in all, I hope readers will find this article thought-provoking.
Melchisedek Chétima
University of Ottawa
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Beyond Ethnic Boundaries: Architectural Practices and Social Identity in the Mandara Highlands, Cameroon, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, June 2018, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0959774318000318.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
